linked-list-good-taste | Linus Torvalds' linked list argument for good taste, explained

linked-list-good-taste is a C library. linked-list-good-taste has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities, it has a Permissive License and it has medium support. You can download it from GitHub.

In a 2016 TED interview (14:10) Linus Torvalds speaks about what he considers good taste in coding. As an example, he presents two implementations of item removal in singly linked lists (reproduced below). In order to remove the first item from a list, one of the implementations requires a special case, the other one does not. Linus, obviously, prefers the latter. [...] I don't want you to understand why it doesn't have the if statement. But I want you to understand that sometimes you can see a problem in a different way and rewrite it so that a special case goes away and becomes the normal case, and that's good code. [...] -- L. Torvalds. The code snippets he presents are C-style pseudocode and are simple enough to follow. However, as Linus mentions in the comment, the snippets lack a conceptual explanation and it is not immediately evident how the more elegant solution actually works. The next two sections look at the technical approach in detail and demonstrate how and why the indirect addressing approach is so neat. The last section extends the solution from item deletion to insertion.